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To: allendale; All
However Earth has been transmitting data in analog form for over one hundred years and in algorithmic digital form for over thirty. It is quite possible that alien civilizations have linked up with one another by relaying data (with long travel times) to each other.

There's almost no way any alien species has even heard our radio signals yet. We've been broadcasting around 100 years, which gives us ~200 light-year bubble where those radio waves have reached. (Slightly different from us moving while sending, but not majorly so.) Also, those broadcasts were not aimed into space, but just random scatter, so they'd be crazy weak by now, if not completely dispersed. We haven't really been actively transmitting into space until about 40 years ago (Arecibo). So our bubble is even smaller. We've only been listening for about the same time, which gives us a very narrow band of distance combined with time in which a transmission would reach us. (Too close/long time is past us, too far haven't reached yet.)

Also, would a highly advanced species still be transmitting/listening on the same frequecies we use? I would hazard a guess that technology would advance more into gamma or similar communications, as the higher frequency gives you more data bandwidth, so more effective communication. And higher advancements might use something entirely different. An ansible perhaps.

Unless some form of faster-than-light travel has been developed (I would assume that's more difficult than FTL communication), it would take millions of years for an alien species to reach the Earth, much less find us out of all the other stars/planets nearby. While they are moving at FTL speeds. And then we're also assuming they developed, adapted, and technologically evolved enough to get to that point. As rare as microbial life is, general animals is even rarer, and intelligent life rarer still, and intelligent life that advances to the stars and beyond even rarer. Remember, all this also had to happen a long time ago for them to even be at the point where they may be arriving in our arm of the Milky Way. Maybe they already came by and left a million years ago, passed by.

And I'm also forgetting, we need an oxygen-carbon based lifeform. If it's some kind of methane, or sulpheric, or other lifeform, they'll be looking for something more like Venus or Neptune. If they come from a much higher/lower gravity. More extreme (for us) cold or heat. Their habitable zone may not include where we are relative to our sun.



50 posted on 05/13/2014 3:54:58 PM PDT by Svartalfiar
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To: Svartalfiar

“SEND MORE CHUCK BERRY”


51 posted on 05/13/2014 3:56:57 PM PDT by dfwgator
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To: Svartalfiar

I think you’ve given the Occam’s Razor answer to the question.


55 posted on 05/13/2014 4:02:58 PM PDT by TigersEye ("No man left behind" is more than an Army Ranger credo it's the character of America.)
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To: Svartalfiar

The age of the universe and the successive generations of stars needed to fuse the heavier elements, and finally incorporate those elements into a G2V star capable of sustaining intelligent life, would put time constraints on how soon that could occur. At least for us in this corner of the Milky Way that’s been about 13.5 billion years (nuclear time) that it’s taken us to come this far in say, a few million years of humankind.

These constraints would be common preceding any intelligent race anywhere. Thus it appears to me that we’ve all had about the same time to develop, give or take a million years, maybe. And I suspect that if life capable of abstracting information from its environment is out there, it’s just as frustrated as we are that they can’t detect us either.


58 posted on 05/13/2014 5:41:41 PM PDT by onedoug
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